John Patitucci: The Gentle Soul

Every jazz musician inhabits a private inner world of amazing energy and light, where they live, dream and fall deeply in love with their unique craft while creating this extraordinary and improvised music. Through the years, some become masters of their instruments, and a selfless interaction with the world takes place, where they share what they learned and even help others find their own voice. This way, paying it forward becomes an act of brotherhood, a present for the future of jazz to behold.

Bass virtuoso John Patitucci believes in the goodness of heart that relies on the musical gifts of those willing and able to create powerful, deeply heart- rooted music. He spends a good amount of his time mentoring and teaching the skills he learned long ago, cherishing every experience as an opportunity to acquire an even deeper understanding of his own dexterity on the bass. This teacher is always a humble and valuable student himself, a constant work in progress. His reward is a worldwide-stage audience looking at him in awe.

have bonded with his unique musical sensibility. A deeply spiritual man, Patitucci has found a gentle equilibrium between his faith and his appreciation of music; everything is part of a whole, and that whole is full of beautiful possibilities. His playing is both energetic and tender, with a technique that is as personal as his relationship with God, almost impossible to emulate.

This is a musician with a heart wide open.

All About Jazz: Tell us a little bit about your involvement with ArtistsWorks.

John Patitucci: They approached me a while back, early last year or something like that, about this new project that they are doing, this new concept. And I thought that it was very interesting to have a situation where people could study with you from anywhere in the world, in a way that was more complete and just so well thought out: the idea about creating a community with the knowledge of bass and creating not only a little academy where they can study bass with someone that they wanted to study with, who also had a particular view point, but also the students would get to know each other, too, and share the experiences and what they learned from it, and benefit from each other's questions. I have been teaching all my life, but not like this. This is a different concept because of the way that it is set up, being able to send a question about their instrument-filmed questions-to me, and I am able to film the response as well; all the answers are posted on the site, together with the questions, and anybody who belongs to the site can look at them any time.

AAJ: As far as teaching goes, like you said, you have been teaching for a long time; you were the artistic director of Bass Collective, you are also involved with the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz and the Betty Carter Jazz Ahead Program, and you were professor of Jazz Studies in City College in New York.

JP: Yes, I left City College in order to do a job for Berklee College of Music; I am now an Artist in Resident, with Danilo Perez

and the Global Jazz Institute and also the Bass department. I have switched after 10 years teaching at City College, and I am now teaching at Berklee School.

AAJ: Teaching has to mean a lot to you.

JP: Yes, it does, and it is kind of strange to me because I started teaching when I was a teenager. I was teaching electric bass to people older than me when I was a kid. That was very odd to me, and I didn't quite understand it, but people wanted to study, so I started learning what that was, and I don't think I have learned so much over the years. Who knows, sometimes I wonder who's learning more, you or the students [laughs]? You learn a lot about communicating, when you have to teach something you have been working on so hard all your life. Some things come easier to you, some things come hard; each student has a different way of understanding the material and actually processing the material that you give them, so you have to be creative in how you teach each one individually.

AAJ: Why do you think it's so important to teach, to you?

JP: I guess you have to feel called to do it. It's a calling; you have to have a desire to reach out and help younger musicians. I think part of the reason is because I had a lot of older musicians that mentored me that really helped me out. When I moved out to California from New York-I lived in California for a number of years before I moved back as an adult in 1996-I had a lot of people help me along the way, and there was a man named Chris Poehler-he was a big mentor to me when I was about 13. He turned me on to jazz, a lot of jazz that I didn't know about, and he also made me learn how to read music, because before I played by ear only, and then he also got me interested in studying classical music as well.